“All of who I am now lies on a continuum—I no longer operate to fulfill roles that were illusions to begin with.”
 
In this deeply personal and introspective performance, Chella Man shares their narrative of self-determination, grief, healing, and reclamation of one’s body through tattooing and explorations of their scars from the medical industrial complex. To Man, piercing their skin is an act of erosion, revealing what lies beneath the surface, both within the body and the broader societal constructs we navigate. The piece compiles revelations of liberation that have become their leading values in life. Shattering the constraints of binary thinking, the performance celebrates queer, disabled, and trans bodies. Autonomy lives as an embodied experience, a testament to resilience and adaptability. Through this work, Man explores the continuum of art, disability, gender, and race by adapting and navigating their body as a mutable canvas for profound self-expression.
 
Autonomy is co-produced with the Jewish Museum, where it will be on view, in installation form, as part of  Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration, a seven-person group exhibition opening May 24th.
 
Please Note: Autonomy will facilitate different access experiences based on hearing status and location in the theater. A part of an artistic approach Man calls “intentional inaccess,” captions will be obscured and inverted for hearing audience members to evoke the access glitches, flaws, and friction that what D/deaf and Hard of Hearing people, including Man, often experience. These moments of partial or unreliable accessibility can feel socially alienating, disempowering, and can make it impossible to fully participate. In this production, the tables are turned, and D/deaf and Hard of Hearing people sit in a section where captions are readable. Man aims to expose these experiences in myriad ways for the audience and spark a meaningful conversation about inaccessibility. Man notes, “This piece is rooted in creating an experience of oscillating access, evoking the perpetual stain of inclusion that I experience every day. Creating these intentional moments questions and reveals how the act of creating access for one can inevitably result in in-access for another.”